About

Beginning of June 2017, the Zurich Haskell Meetup Group will organize ZuriHac 2017, a three day Haskell Hackathon hosted at the HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil. This is the sixth Haskell Hackathon organized by the Zurich Haskell Meetup Group and the first one which is hosted at the HSR. A fantastic venue located right at lake Zurich and providing space for 300 participants.

The Haskell Hackathon is an international, grassroots collaborative coding festival whose goal is to expand the community and to build and improve Haskell libraries, tools, and infrastructure.

This is a great opportunity to learn more about Haskell, meet fellow Haskellers in real life, find new contributors for your project, improve existing libraries and tools or even start new ones!

This event is open to any experience level, from beginners to gurus. In fact, one of the goals is to bring beginners in contact with experts so that the former can get a quick start in the Haskell community. We will have a dedicated beginners' track, and there are going to be mentors on site whom you can directly approach during the whole event with any Haskell-related question you have.

Speakers

Edward Kmett

Stephen Diehl

Keynote on Saturday 10:00

Stephen is a Haskell developer, entrepreneur, and financial systems architect from Boston. His open source work is around numerical computing, compilers, security, and improving Haskell documentation. Author of the amazing What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell.

Julie Moronuki

Keynote on Friday 17:00

Julie is a linguist and teacher who decided, on a whim, to learn Haskell. As her interest in lambdas and static typing grew, she decided to use her teaching expertise to write a Haskell book for beginners, and the result was Haskell Programming from First Principles. Currently she lives in Austin, Texas, where she homeschools her children, adopts too many animals, teaches Haskell at a local meetup, and is working on a new book, called The Joy of Haskell.

Neil Mitchell

Keynote on Friday 10:00

Neil Mitchell has been a Haskell programmer since his PhD at York University, where he worked on making functional programs shorter, faster and safer. Since then he's worked in industry, taking the lessons of functional programming and applying them in finance. Neil is the author of numerous open-source Haskell packages including Hlint (which makes suggestions on how to improve your Haskell code), Hoogle (which searches for functions by both name and type signature) and Shake (a build system, being used for the next iteration of the GHC build system).

Simon Thompson

Keynote on Saturday 17:00

Simon Thompson is Professor of Logic and Computation in the School of Computing at the University of Kent. His main research interests are in functional programming, most recently in designing tools to help people to write and test programs more effectively. One example of such a tool is the Haskell Refactorer. He is also the author of introductory texts on Haskell, Erlang and Miranda, as well as Type Theory and Functional Programming.

Schedule

All talks and keynotes take place in the aula (building 4). Lunch is served in the mensa (building 4). Pizza and BBQ will be consumed outside (in front of building 1).

9:0021:00

Friday

June 9

Doors open

9:00

Keynote: Neil Mitchell

10:00 – 11:00

Project presentation

11:00 – 12:00

Lunch

12:30 – 14:00

Talk: Mario Meili & Cyrill Schenkel

16:00 – 17:00

Keynote: Julie Moronuki

17:00 – 18:00

Pizza

18:00 – 21:00

Saturday

June 10

Keynote: Stephen Diehl

10:00 – 11:00

Lunch

12:00 – 14:00

Talk: Nikita Volkov

16:00 – 17:00

Keynote: Simon Thompson

17:00 – 18:00

BBQ

18:00 – 21:00

Sunday

June 11

Keynote: Edward Kmett

10:00 – 11:00

Lunch

12:00 – 14:00

Project demos

15:00 – 16:00

End of event

17:00

Food

Lunch coupons are sold during registration. A coupon costs CHF 30 and includes lunch for three days. Vegetarian options are available during every lunch. Of course, you are always free to go to nearby restaurants and/or supermarkets, like the past years.

Friday: Sliced Veal with Rösti

Saturday: Pasta Italian Style

Sunday: Sandwich

On Friday evening, a mobile pizzeria will visit the venue. Pizzas will cost around CHF 15.

On Saturday evening, there is a bring-your-own meat BBQ. Meat (or vegetarian/vegan alternatives) can be obtained from nearby supermarkets. We will provide plates, ketchup and mustard, and a seed round of a hundred sausages.

Projects

In between the talks you can join one of these projects and help the maintainers out with bug fixes or new features. We have plenty of space available in 10 separate rooms where you can team up with your peers and work on your favourite project.

Blast

Blast is a distributed computing library inspired by Apache Spark. The current implementation provides local thread and CloudHaskell backends.The next step is to develop a set tools to easily deploy Blast on a cluster.

qua-kit

Qua-kit is a web platform for collaborative analysis and manipulation of simple 3D urban geometry. The website provides means to set up urban design exercises, show demos, and share proposals. We use yesod, GHCJS, and WebGL.

Yampa

Beginner projects

We want to make the event accessible to Haskellers at all levels, which is why we will have dedicated mentors, two codelab projects and beginner-level Haskell exercises.

You can identify mentors from the black Zurihac shirt. They welcome any questions you may have, so please grab them if you have any issues or questions.

Codelab: memegen

The memegen codelab is available on GitHub. It guides you step by step through the implementation of a memegen server in Haskell. Its intended audience are people that want to learn more about writing web application servers in Haskell.

Codelab: webwatch

The webwatch codelab introduces you to client-side HTTP programming with a command-line webpage watcher utility that watches a webpage for links with a certain text and will send a Slack message when one is found.

Beginner exercises

The beginner exercises are for you who is just starting out with Haskell and are interested in learning the fundamentals. For reading material to supplement the exercises we recommend Learn you a Haskell.

The venue is located right next to the lake, and weather is predicted to be superb (25°C, 77℉), so feel free to bring your swimming gear.

Getting there

You can take the S7 or S15 to get from the Zurich main station to Rapperswil. These trains run regularly in 30 minute and 60 minute intervals, respectively.

If you arrive at the Zurich airport, first take the train to the Zurich main station and then continue with S7 or S15. Trains from the airport towards the city run every few minutes.

Tickets: If you stay in Zurich city, get a day pass for all zones. It's good for all public transportation around Zurich, up to Rapperswil. A one-way ticket costs 17.20CHF, the day pass 34.40CHF. If you want to stay closer to the venue and save on transportation, please see the section further below with accomodation suggestions around Rapperswil.

Getting around

See this map for more information on accomodation, grocery stores, and other useful places.

Contact

Before the event, and in particular during the event, you can find us and other participants at Zurihac Slack or on the #zurihac channel on freenode (open in your IRC client. In addition, feel free to post on Twitter and Google+ using the hashtag #ZuriHac2017.

Terms and Conditions

Each participant will retain ownership of any and all intellectual and industrial property rights to his or her work created or used during the Hackathon.